I worked in this area, helping with quantum networking and sensing commercialization for a few academic labs. One thing that surprised me was how much bullshit went into the grants and how easily certain defense agencies just wrote big checks. It would start with real science, rooted in papers and recent progress. Then you’d paint some insane vision for the future with, and I’m being diplomatic here, an extremely aggressive timeline. Everyone who was in academia seemed to already know that you wrote the grant with one set of targets but you’d realistically hit a fraction of that. If at all. Maybe that’s the way it’s always been? But if it is, it’s new to me.
I think when you can print money or have loose pocketbooks, that incentivizes more and more of this “vision selling” which becomes further and further from the reality. Given my intimate knowledge of this, I don’t believe these timelines for one second. Does that mean we should not fund it or pursue it? No. But a little dose of reality here might actually help longer term rather than hinder it lest we can’t continue this VC pyramid scheme / hot potato game we’ve playing with all tech (e.g. the web, AI) the past few decades.
I worked in this area, helping with quantum networking and sensing commercialization for a few academic labs. One thing that surprised me was how much bullshit went into the grants and how easily certain defense agencies just wrote big checks. It would start with real science, rooted in papers and recent progress. Then you’d paint some insane vision for the future with, and I’m being diplomatic here, an extremely aggressive timeline. Everyone who was in academia seemed to already know that you wrote the grant with one set of targets but you’d realistically hit a fraction of that. If at all. Maybe that’s the way it’s always been? But if it is, it’s new to me.
I think when you can print money or have loose pocketbooks, that incentivizes more and more of this “vision selling” which becomes further and further from the reality. Given my intimate knowledge of this, I don’t believe these timelines for one second. Does that mean we should not fund it or pursue it? No. But a little dose of reality here might actually help longer term rather than hinder it lest we can’t continue this VC pyramid scheme / hot potato game we’ve playing with all tech (e.g. the web, AI) the past few decades.